Archive for 2006

Journal, Day FiveDecember 8, 2006: Reader Rowan Steigs, sounding slightly tetchy as though he himself may be short of a little quiet time, asks what I want the emptiness for. (See his comment.) This is a very good question. Just to [...]by Kay Ryan

Journal, Day FourDecember 7, 2006: Reader Kim (no last name) is curious about my admitted discomfort with using poems to describe what already exists. This came up earlier, when I was thinking about ekphrastic poetry. I said, [...]by Kay Ryan

Journal, Day ThreeDecember 6, 2006: This is a good question that reader Robin Yim poses: Can one court sensory deprivation (which I mentioned on Monday in relation to the camera obscura photographer) or does one just have to be ready [...]by Kay Ryan

Journal, Day TwoDecember 5, 2006: Ekphrastic poems. Norris Palmstreick asks if I write them. Well, now that I have looked up the word and determined that an ekphrastic poem is one that describes another work of art, usually a [...]by Kay Ryan

Journal, Day OneDecember 4, 2006: In spite of my description above, I really haven’t been spending time blogging, or even reading blogs. This is my first, and undertaken because I was asked. I could give it a grumpy title, like [...]by Kay Ryan

Journal, Day FiveDecember 1, 2006: A month or so back the intensively peer-reviewed, internationally respected British medical journal The Lancet suggested that an additional 650,000 people have died in Iraq due to the prosecution of [...]by Mark Thwaite

Journal, Day FourNovember 30, 2006: With their lack of subtlety and inability either to see or apply nuance, both Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have been seeking to promulgate a kind of militant, proselytizing atheism of late. [...]by Mark Thwaite

Journal, Day ThreeNovember 29, 2006: Roy Fisher is a Birmingham poet. His often jazz-inspired work shows how place and folk conspire with each other, and inspire each other, in the lives they lead in the landscapes in which they lead [...]by Mark Thwaite

Journal, Day TwoNovember 28, 2006: I read a lot of translated novels and poems. Indeed, the majority of books that I hold most dear weren’t originally written in English and so I owe a good deal of my reading pleasure to the [...]by Mark Thwaite

Journal, Day OneNovember 27, 2006: I’m not one for conflict, but I was pleased to see the rumpus in the US that ensued over Alice Quinn’s Elizabeth Bishop book (Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and [...]by Mark Thwaite